L.E.V. Matadero Festival kicks off, redefining digital art and electronic music
- Composer Lorenzo Senni presents the Spanish premiere of Canone Infinito Xtended, while New York studio Team Rolfes, together with Lil Mariko, unveils 321 Rule, a milestone in motion capture.
- The immersive simulation Drift Lattice by Theo Triantafyllidis, with music by Diego Navarro, generates a digital marine ecosystem that reacts to global climate data.
- Myriam Bleau & Nien Tzu Weng present Second Self, a cyborg-inspired performance that fuses body, screen, sound, and movement to explore how digitization transforms human identity.
- The augmented reality experience Fortune Teller, created for children by French artist Julie Stephen Chheng, connects nature and technology through play.
- Mexican artist Murcof will offer a new installment of L.E.V. Silent Sound Sessions, with a free wireless headphone concert at Plaza Matadero.
- Tickets for live performances and extended reality experiences are available at levfestival.com and mataderomadrid.org.
Matadero Madrid, the contemporary creation center of the Department of Culture, Tourism, and Sport, is hosting the 7th edition of L.E.V. Matadero through Sunday, September 21. Once again, the festival reaffirms its commitment to a program featuring national and international artists exploring new languages and narratives born at the intersection of technology, music, and performance.
This year’s programming is built on the desire to offer a critical lens on contemporary anxieties. The festival brings together artistic proposals that explore diverse forms of cultural production to better understand our time. From works addressing the climate crisis to those reflecting on social precarity, hyperconsumerism, or the pathologization of difference, the festival invites audiences to discover and reimagine material reality through visions of possible worlds.
Concerts and audiovisual performances at Nave 10
This year’s concerts and audiovisual performances at L.E.V. Matadero present a unique selection of projects that reinvent live shows and expand them into immersive, hybrid, and experimental territories.
Italian composer and producer Lorenzo Senni, one of the most influential figures in contemporary electronic music and a key artist on Warp Records, will debut Canone Infinito Xtended in Spain. This ever-evolving piece reconfigures trance archetypes and repetition to build an unfinished sonic journey where immersive experience merges with reflection on composing in the digital age.
The festival will also host the Spanish premiere of 321 Rule, the latest creation from New York studio Team Rolfes, accompanied by Lil Mariko. Pioneers in motion capture and real-time animation, their work has revolutionized stage language through collaborations with artists such as Lady Gaga, Arca, and Caroline Polachek, as well as brands like Dior and Louis Vuitton. With 321 Rule, they bring to the stage a vibrant, radically contemporary spectacle that blurs the boundaries between virtual and physical realms.
From Canada and Taiwan comes Second Self by Myriam Bleau and Nien Tzu Weng, a hypnotic performance investigating how digitization reshapes human identity into new hybrid existences. With a cyborg aesthetic blending body, screen, sound, and movement, the piece unfolds as a stage ritual where technology becomes organic.
The Italian collective SPIME.IM will present Grey Line, an audiovisual live set that transforms the color grey into a metaphor for our uncertain times. The work crafts a narrative crossing climate crisis, information overload, and moral ambiguity, offering audiences a sensorial and critical experience reflecting the saturation of the present.
Nave 10 will also host ARS NATURA by French artists Annabelle Playe, Hugo Arcier, and Rima Ben Brahim. The piece invites audiences to contemplate natural landscapes and brutalist architectures as post-anthropocene visions. Sound and image generate an immersive audiovisual journey led by a stage presence that animates the spaces with its gestures.
Incertitude, by Matthew Biederman and Alain Thibault, explores the tension between chance and control. The performance merges algorithmically generated visuals with synthetic sound, navigating the edge between order and glitch, analog and digital, in an audiovisual landscape of unpredictability.
That same day, Carmen Jaci and Matthew Schoen will premiere in Madrid an audiovisual performance reflecting on the relationship between humans and digital data. Through app-inspired interfaces, music, and visuals, the work offers a critical and poetic perspective on information overload and identity in the technological age.
On the national scene, MP3—formed by Arnau Pérez, Pau Vegas, and Fernando Careaga—will debut MP3 Live #1, a journey where dance and electronic music intertwine in real time through sensors that convert movement into sound. This project was developed with the support of Matadero’s Center for Artistic Residencies, following their selection in Madrid’s 2024 experimental electronic music call.
Sound session at Plaza Matadero
On Friday, September 19, L.E.V. will present a new Silent Sound Session at Plaza Matadero with two free performances by Mexican artist Fernando Corona, known as Murcof. These special sessions feature wireless headphones provided by the organizers.
The artist will perform The Etna Sessions, a project created from field recordings in Etna Park, transformed through analog, digital, and modular synthesizers to produce a soundscape oscillating between drone, ambient, vaporous dub, and minimalist techno with volcanic atmospheres. In the same session, he will also present Twin Color, a work combining modular synthesis and studio experimentation to create an immersive experience where music unfolds as a narrative between melancholy and rhythmic force.
Vortex: a true laboratory of the future
The exhibition section Vortex serves as a true laboratory of the future, a space to immerse in extended reality projects exploring urgent issues such as neurodiversity, consumer society, or precarity. These experiences will unfold in Nave 0, Central de Diseño, and Taller, where technological innovation is placed at the service of creation and critical thought.
Highlights include Noire, an augmented reality experience by Stéphane Foenkinos and Pierre Alain Giraud based on the book by Tania de Montaigne. Awarded Best Immersive Work at the 77th Cannes Film Festival (2024), it transports viewers to the era of racial segregation in the southern United States to relive the story of Claudette Colvin, a teenager who refused to give up her bus seat months before Rosa Parks. It is a narrative device where documentary storytelling merges with cutting-edge technology.
Another must-see is Impulse: Playing with Reality by May Abdalla and Barry Gene Murphy, awarded the Career Prize at the 2024 Venice Biennale. Narrated in English by Tilda Swinton, the piece offers an immersive, contemporary approach to Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, inviting viewers to step into the shoes of those who experience the world through this condition.
Vortex will also feature the world premiere of The Sutherland Test by french artist Adelin Schweitzer, a collective experience that pushes the boundaries of performance, technology, and social critique. Positioned between the visual and performative, the work creates a revealing discomfort that questions how technology alters our perception of the environment.
The journey continues with Uncanny Alley by Rick Treweek, a widely acclaimed VRChat project that guides visitors through the most unsettling and fascinating corners of the metaverse, where the virtual feels as tangible as the real.
Spanish creator Carles Castaño Oliveiros presents *****2025/…*, a mixed reality installation produced by Servicios Inmersivos. The work combines political narrative with a dystopian scenario, delivering a raw, biting portrayal of the contradictions within our hyperconsumerist society.
Audiovisual installations circuit
At Cineteca Matadero’s Plató, the festival presents throughout the week Drift Lattice by Greek artist Theo Triantafyllidis. This immersive simulation transports audiences into a digital marine ecosystem where the beauty of aquatic life collides with the disturbing presence of synthetic waste. Constantly transforming, the work reacts in real time to global climate and ecological data, becoming a speculative barometer of human impact on the oceans.
In Drift Lattice, technology not only constructs a hypnotic visual environment but also shapes a critical and poetic experience that directly challenges audiences with the tension between nature and technology. The piece features a crucial sound layer composed by Diego Navarro, enveloping the simulation in a musical atmosphere that breathes and evolves with the altered ecosystem, heightening both immersion and evocative power. It is an urgent call to recognize the fragility of oceans in the Anthropocene, a reminder that our actions have environmental consequences.
At Nave Una, LP Rondeau presents Liminal, an interactive installation symbolizing the threshold between past and present. A 2.75-meter ring captures in black and white the silhouette of those who pass through it, projecting it distorted to evoke the unstoppable passage of time.
Augmented city
Among the augmented reality experiences, Fortune Teller by French artist Julie Stephen Chheng invites audiences to discover spirits linked to hidden natural elements in the urban space. Accessible via a free app, these spirits reveal desires, fears, and visions of the world, generating a poetic encounter that connects nature, technology, and thought.
The Festival of Visual Electronics and Extended Realities, organized by Matadero Madrid, is curated by L.E.V. (Laboratory for Visual Electronics and Extended Realities) with the collaboration of Nave 10, Cineteca Madrid, and the Center for Artistic Residencies, with the participation of Central de Diseño.
Tickets: www.levfestival.com | www.mataderomadrid.org
More information: comunicacion@mataderomadrid.org | prensa@levfestival.org